Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Get up to 13,750 Avios with Sainsbury’s life insurance – and a look at other insurance offers

Links on Head for Points may pay us an affiliate commission. A list of partners is here.

When Nectar and Avios began their partnership in January 2021, it opened up Sainsbury’s Bank as another potential route for indirectly earning Avios.

When it comes to earning Avios from insurance, your best bet is Alan Boswell Insurance Brokers. You can read about Alan Boswell’s Avios offer in this article. They can offer you up to 10,000 Avios when you take out household, business, medical or landlord insurance.

Boswell doesn’t offer Avios on all insurance types, however, and Sainsbury’s Bank could fill some of the gaps. Details of what it offers are here.

What insurance products can I buy from Sainsbury’s Bank?

These are the insurance products on offer:

The best offers are targetted

What we have seen since Avios partnered with Nectar is that Sainsbury’s Bank does NOT have many ‘open to all’ insurance deals.

Most offers are targetted and promoted via the Nectar app, in the ‘Partners’ section. It is worth having a look there from time to time to see what you are offered.

There is one deal which is open to all, however ….

Get 22,000 Nectar points with a life insurance sign-up offer

There is a generous offer running on Sainsbury’s Bank life insurance as you can see here.

This what you can earn:

  • 10,000 Nectar points (6,250 Avios) if your policy is under £8.50 per month
  • 16,000 Nectar points (10,000 Avios) if your policy is £8.50 to £20 per month
  • 22,000 Nectar points (13,750 Avios) if your policy is over £20 per month

You don’t qualify for the points until you have paid your first five monthly premiums. After this time, the points may take a further 60 days to reach your Nectar account.

If you have an existing life policy which you could switch to Sainsbury’s Bank then this is a decent deal. The maths also isn’t bad purely as a points offer.

For example, if you could set up a level of cover which cost exactly £8.50 per month, you would be spending £42.50 over the minimum five month commitment. In return you will receive 16,000 Nectar points worth 10,000 Avios. You can’t argue with that.

Conclusion

As the value of any insurance offer is totally dependent on the premium you are quoted, you clearly need to look at any Nectar earning in the context of what your policy will cost.

That said, it is worth keeping an eye on the Nectar app to see what targetted sign-up offers are made available to you.

PS. Don’t forget to also check out Alan Boswell Group’s Avios-earning deals on business, landlord, household and private medical insurance.


How to earn Avios from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (December 2023)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

Barclaycard Avios Plus card

Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard

Get 25,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £10,000 Read our full review

Barclaycard Avios card

Barclaycard Avios Mastercard

5,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £20,000 Read our full review

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the famous annual 2-4-1 voucher Read our full review

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending £12,000 Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points. These points convert at 1:1 into Avios.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 9th January 2024, you will receive 30,000 Membership Rewards points (convertible to 30,000 Avios) with American Express Preferred Rewards Gold. You receive 25,000 points if you spend £3,000 in three months and a further 5,000 points if you hold the card for 15 months. You can apply here.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 9th January 2024, you will receive a huge 100,000 Membership Rewards points (convertible to 100,000 Avios) with The Platinum Card. You receive 75,000 points if you spend £10,000 in six months and a further 25,000 points if you hold the card for 15 months. You can apply here.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 30,000 points (TO 9th JANUARY), FREE for a year & four airport ….. Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

Crazy 100,000 points (TO 9th JANUARY) and a huge range of valuable benefits – for a fee Read our full review

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital On Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios.

Capital On Tap Business Rewards Visa

Get a 10,000 points bonus plus an extra 500 points for our readers Read our full review

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus.

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios Read our full review

There are also generous bonuses on the two American Express Business cards, with the points converting at 1:1 into Avios. These cards are open to sole traders as well as limited companies.

American Express Business Platinum

40,000 points bonus and an annual £200 Amex Travel credit Read our full review

American Express Business Gold

20,000 points sign-up bonus and free for a year Read our full review

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.

Comments (13)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • TimM says:

    In purely terms of cost per Avios, the £5 pcm option is the best deal at 0.4p/Avios (vs. 0.425p/Avios and 0.73p/Avios for the other tiers). Sainsbury’s allow you to enter the desired monthly premium as an alternative to the desired cover, which is handy.

    • BJ says:

      The life cover got as high as 30k at one point in last two years I think, but you had to pick the right level to maximise the benefit as you indicate. Pet was 10k early 2022 too I think.

  • Froggitt says:

    20,000 Nectar points for an over 50s Life Insurance policy starting at £6 a month

    • BJ says:

      The one I use, and you can get bonuses on two policies per household per year. I take one level and one increasing policy each year and both post fine. Been the cheapest way to buy avios since the Nectar partnership started.

      • Axel says:

        The Wise purxhase route of £0.003 per avios seems to be defunct. So now looking at this life policy. How many years do you opt for in the policy?

        • Rob says:

          It doesn’t matter – you can cancel without penalty at any point.

    • cinereus says:

      Where are you seeing this?

  • Peter says:

    Sainsbury’s Bank have also stopped offering double nectar on your shopping with car insurance. To quote:

    “From your renewal date, we’ll no longer be offering our double Nectar point promotion.

    While this offer is popular with some customers, we’re focused on investing in prices which all customers can benefit from. We’re sorry for any disappointment this may cause.

    You’ll still be able to collect Nectar points on your Sainsbury’s shopping and fuel when you use your Nectar card.”

    The double Nectar points meant that Sainsbury’s Bank were the best deal at the end of 2021 for car insurance, but the lack of the double points offer took them out of the running when it came to renewal.

    • WillPS says:

      How? It was worth £5 in every £1000 spent at JS supermarkets and £5 in every 1000 *litres* at filling stations.

      I can’t fathom why this would motivate anybody who had actually done the maths. If it was the cheapest option anyway then sure, why not – but a very poor reason to select an insurance provider.

  • BJ says:

    Many just use the life and pet insurance as a means of buying avios.

  • Bosniaman says:

    Saw this:
    Britain’s newest railway to arrive two years late as costs pile up
    Robert Lea – Industrial Editor
    Britain’s newest railway, and one of its most expensive, is to arrive two years late and 33 per cent over budget.

    The Luton Dart, or direct air-rail transit link, between Luton airport and the nearby Midland mainline railway, has the aim of transforming public transport access to the notoriously difficult-to-reach Bedfordshire hub north of London. Its planned 2021 opening was put back to last October but that was missed too and it will not now open until Easter at the earliest.

    It was originally priced up at £225 million but has suffered delays in its construction that were not helped by the pandemic, made worse by technology upgrades and topped off by a wrangle with Network Rail over revenue sharing. The cost of the project, borne by Luton borough council, the airport’s owner, has ballooned to £300 million. That means that the 1.4-mile link, which runs from newly built dedicated platforms at Luton Airport Parkway railway station up over the Chiltern escarpment before arriving under the airport terminal, will have cost nearly £130,000 per metre.

    The delays have prompted the value of the Dart project to be written down in the airport’s accounts by £184 million.

    The link is planned to run autonomous people-carrying pods using solar energy. It is supposed to replace the local bus service from the railway station to the airport, enabling those catching the fast service from London St Pancras to get from the capital to the check-in desk via a four-minute Dart transfer in little over half an hour.

    That will greatly aid Luton airport’s plan to get its numbers arriving by public transport from 14 per cent to about 45 per cent, on a par with Gatwick south of London. It is a key environmental part of Luton’s application to cement its position as London’s fourth airport by applying this year to the government for a £2.5 billion expansion from its capacity of 18 million passengers a year to 32 million, putting it closer to Stansted, 30 miles to the east.

    Graham Olver, chief executive of Luton Rising, which oversees the airport, said: “Our primary focus is safety and we have taken time to make sure we get the customer experience right.”

    • Briand says:

      Please post in the appropriate forum…this is to do with Sainsbury and certainly not the Luton fiasco.

  • Alex says:

    Is the offer account based and not general? I don’t have any option in my partners section.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

The UK's biggest frequent flyer website uses cookies, which you can block via your browser settings. Continuing implies your consent to this policy. Our privacy policy is here.